Today I read with great interest an article in Vox.com entitled: “Fleming’s discovery of penicillin couldn’t get published today. That’s a huge problem.” As a long time academician and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Cureus, I could not agree more! Not only would Fleming’s discovery go unreported, but Jenner’s discovery of the first small pox vaccine or Connecticut dentist Crawford Long’s discovery of ether anesthesia would also be dismissed as trivial curiosities and anecdotes.

In a rapidly changing world of medical science, the process of peer-reviewed publishing has never been more important for validating medical knowledge, yet at the same time the arcane processes of peer-reviewed journals have never been more at odds with potential societal benefits. The altruism that is supposed to drive the publication of scientific research has been almost entirely co-opted by the peculiar needs of academic promotion and tenure, as well as the pecuniary demands of the scholarly publishing industry; the public good of medical knowledge has been reduced to a mere after-thought by both academia and the publishing industry. These two interest groups only seek seemingly important “big science,” and actually decry any role for mere clinical observation, which Cureus has in the past and the Vox authors now in the present both refer to, in a somewhat ironic, self-deprecating manner, as “small science.”

Despite the above dire (my word) situation in medical publishing, just maybe the proverbial pendulum is about to swing the other way. For example, the conventional wisdom is that we are entering an era of “personalized medicine,” a concept which at its core recognizes the unique genomic, proteomic, metabolomics and demographic, etc. profile of every patient. Embodied within this concept is the understanding that each of us will as patients undergo a unique clinical experience, not necessarily predicted by a priori knowledge, and that such observations will need to be documented if we are to build new scientific understandings. Assuming that to be true, the future of medical publishing may well be found in observational “small science.” If this is true, the important medical publishing of the future may be about to shift from “the few” elites reporting big science, to the power of the many, within the trenches of medicine, collectively reporting their humble clinical observations? For the record, Cureus aspires to lead this transition into the new world of small, yet very powerful, medical science.